Séminaire Atelier 3 – Oane Visser (Erasmus University Rotterdam) professeur invité, « How to confront a platform? Contestation, refusal, alter-digitalisation and agrarian politics in the digital era ».

L’atelier 3 organise une séance dans le cadre de la venue d’Oane Visser à Paris . Elle portera sur les enjeux de la digitalisation de l’agriculture.

How to confront a platform? Contestation, refusal, alter-digitalisation and agrarian politics in the digital era.

While proponents widely hail the benefits of digitalization in farmland and farming (in terms of food security, economic, environmental benefits) there is an emerging literature that examines the challenges and risks. A growing literature of critical social sciences studies identifies the numerous threats that the digitalization of farming and farmland (potentially) pose to farmers and farm workers, such as digital land registration ignoring indigenous land claims, loss of autonomy, growing surveillance, de-skilling, and substitution of workers by drone services. Yet, studies on farmers’resistance against the (downsides of) digital agriculture are virtually absent. This is especially striking in the context of the rich literature on farm mobilization against earlier technologies (e.g. pesticides and GMOs) and the emerging literature on the recent growth of farmer protests and new (right-wing) agrarian populism.
There is an urgent need to analyse what the digitalization of farming and farmland means for repertoires of contestation. This article outlines a new playbook for agrarian politics in the era of digitalization, that will affect non-adopters as much as adopters of digital technologies. We discuss why seasoned forms of protest may prove ineffective against intangible technologies, the more diverse set of corporate actors involved, and proponents ‘sophisticated’ discourses embracing sustainability.
We argue that new tools, concepts and alliances are urgently needed for critical agrarian activists (and scholars) in a digital age. We present a categorisation of farmers’ responses (including contestation, refusal and alter-globalisation), drawing on literature on farmer mobilization and resistance, farmland conflicts, and critical data studies.

Bio : Oane Visser is Associate Professor agrarian, food & environmental studies at the Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University Rotterdam, and research associate of the London-based Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF), and the International Centre for Frugal Innovation (ICFI) of Delft Technological U., Leiden U. & Erasmus U.  Visser is chair of the Political Ecology research group at ISS. He has been visiting scholar at Oxford University, City U. New York (CUNY), Cornell University and the U. of Toronto. Visser is an editor of Focaal – J. of Global & Historical Anthropology, and consulting editor for the J. of Peasant Studies. He has won numerous Dutch, European and international grants as PI; an ERC starting grant, and e.g.. Dutch NWO grant, an ISRF and Toyota Foundation grant, and policy-oriented grants (e.g. Land Academy/Min. of Foreign Affairs), and as supervisor or advisor in other grants (Marie Curie Global Fellowship, ESRC ‘Digitalising food assistance’). M. Visser has conducted extensive research on rural and (peri)urban agrifood, land and environmental issues (including climate change) from a development studies / social sciences perspective. He currently leads amongst others a project on (peri)urban farming and the role of high-tech and low-tech technologies, a project on bottom-up farmer-led digital innovation in the EU and the US, and on digital platforms for smallholders in Ghana. Over the past years he has studied particularly digitalisation in agrifood and the environment, see e.g. Visser et al 2021 on the inaccuracies and risk of so-called precision/smart solutions and Siegmann, Ivosevic & Visser 2024 on automation and labour. www.iss.nl/visser  / visser@iss.nl

Pour ceux qui ne pourrait pas être physiquement présent, la séance sera connectée à Zoom ici :  https://u-paris.zoom.us/j/89429709540?pwd=lUcbRYPSb7Y3gegZw8hbYz20lCOFKm.1

ID de réunion: 894 2970 9540
Code secret: 753806